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Induction from coiled up leads???

Over the years I have heard over and over about the affects of having your leads coiled up and it having adverse affects. I have spent the last few hours searching the net hoping to find some "GOOD" info on this.

A buddy of mine recently told me that the more you wrap your lead (don't recall which one) around something like a leg on a table, the more induction you get. His take on it was that in some cases this is a good thing and in some cases it is not.

To make a long story short, a guy I know that has welded on pipe for the last 30 years or so, ran a root pass with my Trailblazer 302 and said he didn't much like the way it ran. You could tell that he did a pretty good job but you could also tell that it really didn't want to tie in very well. I can't help but wonder if having 125' or so of lead wrapped up on a "steel wheel" might be having an affect on the arc?

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i think this is Dan's from the Hobart forum- I never labeled it when I copied it

That is the picture along with Dans thread that planted the idea.
I have two PA-3A airco pulsed welders that mostly just sat gathering dust after the customer with 30 alum. dump trailers sold out. Now and then would try steel mig with them but they always threw way to much spatter to be usable. I probably listened to too much advice to try this gas, try this wire ect. Anyhow after several years of fooling with it now and then I hooked about 30' of #1 cable to the 50' of 1/0 ground on the machine hooked up a bottle of C-25, result, a very usable machine.

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This is a picture from the mm 140 mig manual when I started messing with ours at work about four yrs ago the guys said it would just burn back to the tips and mess them up. So I started trying to figure it out finally I looked at this picture and the neg and pos leads were crossed . The neg goes around the case and comes from the top and pos comes in the bottom. When they put it together new they didn't have that neg lead the way it was suppose to be. So I guess it was causing it to magnetize now it works perfect.

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I had reels for several years, they are fast out and fast in and take up minimal space on a crowded bed.

But, they get really hot at higher amperages say 160A+ or so all day. That means you have to do more lead maintenance, cut off the black burnt ends (all 4) much more often. My last set of (good) leads cost about 2k, I don't like cutting 4' off each end (4) twice a year to have good clean copper to put new connections on.

I gave up the convinience of reels for pronghorn racks with big loose loops and are happy, happy.

An old SA-200/250/300 is less concerned with tightly packed leads than say a Vantage or PipePro but they still overheat meaning you have to spool them out loose on the ground for any long term higher amp use. And your high $ leads will die a lot sooner.
A Vantage or PipePro arc characteristics will be adversly affected by tightly wound reels in my opinion. The nice adjustments those machines give you can be lost with a set of reels.
The Anger Management knob in downhill pipe mode becomes a lot less or even no effect(tive). And that knob is your pinch control using flux core. So I really like the use of it and don't want to make it innefective, it does too much good at the puddle, for me.

A lot of people live happily with reels but they were more trouble and $$ than they were worth to me after about 5 years of use. But I run high amperage (to me, 200-400A) for long days and weeks. I want opimal arc characteristics at the sharp end regardless of anything else and I want to squeeze every bit of adjustability/arc tailoring out of my machine. Your situation may be mo different.

I know jam up pipeliners (few) with reels on the truck, working solely in a tie in or road bore situation. Get in the salty firing squad and it's a little different. Go outside pipeline tie in world and it can be very different due to the heat run and the hours/day it's run.

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There is no comparison on a Lincoln 300D to a Miller trailbazer 302. Basically the 300D is a far better machine, only better version would be a Red-D-Arc 3+3.

Getting back to that magnetic inductance, A reel with a steel core (whether a steel tube or shaft) has the greatest inductance, which if placed wrong can give grief to a circuit board machine. An Aluminum reel with a Aluminum core will give the least, and will act like an air gap,ie, coiled cables lying on the ground.

Lincoln has put out a video on the effects of magnetic inductance and what your arc looks like using steel wraps , reels and coiled arc cable. I saw it on the last Linc course. Kinda cool.